The bulk of literature finding support for the Skill-Biased Technological Change (SBTC) hypothesis has focused on the US and the UK, while evidence on other countries is "mixed". We use firm-level data to test for the presence of SBTC in Italian manufacturing. This is interesting since, as well...

We investigate the impact of delaying the first birth on Italian mothers' labor market outcomes around childbirth. The effect of postponing motherhood is identified using biological fertility shocks, namely the occurrence of miscarriages and stillbirths. Focusing on mothers' behavior around...

Research on the transition from school to work is increasingly focusing on the horizontal stratification of educational systems, that is on how different educational tracks have an effect on students’ occupational chances. In the case of tertiary education, this means analyzing how different...

In this paper we describe the hypothesis of effort-based career opportunities as a situation in which profit maximizing firms create incentives for employees to work longer hours than the bargained ones, by making career prospects dependent on working hours. When effort-based career...

La letteratura di crescita esogena ha posto l���accento sull���importanza dell���accumulazione di capitale fisico come fattore di crescita economica di lungo periodo. Pi?? recentemente, tuttavia, laNuova Teoria della Crescita ha chiarito che il processo di sviluppo di una...

Estimates of a high average return to a degree for UK graduates have provided a policy rationale for increasing the share of the costs of higher education borne by UK students over recent decades. We use evidence from a cohort of people born in 1970 to estimate hourly wage returns to a...

After the "3+2" University reform in Italy there has been a fast increase in the number of students. A common wisdom is that this result was partly achieved by reducing the standard of Higher Education (HE). In this paper we first build a theoretical model in which individuals decide whether to...

In questo articolo vengono analizzati i fattori che influenzano l’impegno di studio, e conseguentemente la performance degli studenti iscritti all’universit` a e quelli che spingono gli studenti a indirizzarsi verso uno specifico corso di laurea (facolt`a). In particolare, un modello teorico...

This paper investigates the differences in early occupational earnings of UK male graduates by degree subject during the period 1980-1993. We match administrative student-level data from the Universities' Statistical Record (USR) and occupational earnings information from the New Earnings Survey...

This paper investigates the effect of parents’ current income and long-term;family characteristics on individuals’ highest educational qualification ob-tained;by age 26 using UK data from the 1970 British Cohort Study. The;issues of the possible sample selection bias produced by the not...